He held posts at
Florida Memorial College,
William Woods College, and
Eastern Washington State College, before his appointment in 1972 as
Michigan State University's associate professor of humanities. In 1985 Greaves was appointed to Florida State University's Courtesy Professorship of Religion and then to their Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professorship of History in 1989. From 1993 until 2002 he was chairman of the department of history at Florida State. In 1981 he was elected fellow of the
Royal Historical Society and in 1987 to the
American Philosophical Society. In 1991 he was appointed president of the
American Society of Church History and he also served as president of the International John Bunyan Society (1992–1995). His 1969 work
The Puritan Revolution and Educational Thought was awarded the
Walter D. Love Prize of the Conference on British Studies and his
Society and Religion in Elizabethan England (1981) was shortlisted for the
Robert Livingston Schuyler Prize of the
American Historical Association. Greaves was awarded the
Albert C. Outler Prize in Ecumenical Church History from the American Society of Church History for his 1997 work, ''God's Other Children: Protestant Nonconformists and the Emergence of Denominational Churches in Ireland, 1660–1700''. Greaves wrote extensively on
John Bunyan and he edited volumes 2, 8, 9 and 11 of
Oxford University Press'
The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan. He also wrote a trilogy on the British radical underground in
Restoration Britain:
Deliver Us from Evil (1986),
Enemies under His Feet (1990) and
Secrets of the Kingdom (1992). He also edited the three-volume work
Biographical Dictionary of British Radicals in the Seventeenth Century between 1982 and 1984, for which he wrote more than 180 of its entries. At the time of his death he was writing a biography of
Robert Ferguson. ==Works==